In honour of International Holocaust Remembrance Day
27 January 1944
Auschwitz was liberated by Soviet troops;
since 2005 this date is observed as the
International Holocaust Remembrance Day,
by United Nations General Assembly resolution.
In honour of Sir Winston Churchill's death January 24 1965
Churchill dies age 90
Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
from 1940 to 1945 and 1951 to 1955.
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SIR MARTIN TALKS ABOUT HIS BOOK
SIR MARTIN’S BOOK THE HOLOCAUST INSPIRES TEACHERS
How to give teachers background in the Holocaust to inspire their own teaching of it? Dr Harriet Sepinwall at the College of
Saint Elizabeth in Morristown, New Jersey,
uses Sir Martin's book The Holocaust,
to train teachers on the Holocaust.
I grew up wondering how the Holocaust happened, how my grandparents and their young daughters could have been taken from their homes, as Jews across Europe were during the Second World War, and brutally murdered. I read Martin's The Holocaust (known by various subtitles, The Jewish Tragedy – in the UK and Canada, The History of the Jews of Europe During the Second World War – in the US, and The Human Tragedy, now in eBook edition). I wanted to know how this systematic murder across the continent of Europe had happened, and what had happened.
Martin spent time deep in the archives at Yad Vashem researching – some days, he recounted to me, he could not last more than an hour before he would be sick to his stomach and need to get air. He met those who had survived, those who had resisted, those who had helped Jews – he understood how important their eye-witness accounts were, though he was criticised at the time for using personal testimony. He travelled to the locations of murder, and his 1959 visit to Treblinka where he found bone fragments in the soil is recounted in the book's Preface.
Martin always felt deeply for his generation of children whose lives were cut short, who did not have the opportunities that he had – an education, love and family, and the freedom to pursue his interests. It is from this deep well of connection, along with his archival approach, that makes this book such an important place to begin any study and discussion of the Holocaust.
Sir Martin's speech at the India International Centre, Delhi, 3 June 2002 The Rise of Fascism in Europe in the Twentieth Century:
Lessons for Today
I first came to this great city in 1958 forty-four years ago, and was present when Jawaharlal Nehru spoke at the Red Fort on the eleventh anniversary of Indian Independence – to a crowd estimated at one million. In those days India was, as she is today, the world's largest democracy. A country for which fascism is – or ought to be – an alien creed, flourishing (when it does) on a distant continent.
Haider and Fortyn and Le Pen are not of Indian ideological stock, any more than Britain's inter-war fascist leader, Sir Oswald Mosley.
BOOK CLUB QUIZ 20 January 1942
Meeting of Nazi and German government officials at the German villa of Wannsee discussed the
“Final Solution to the Jewish Question”.
What were the earlier “solutions” perpetrated by the Germans and their collaborators, and what was this “Final Solution”?
